Ruling likely ends state redistricting battles

Tuesday

AUSTIN - The U.S. Supreme Court has made it easier for the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature and State Attorney General Greg Abbott to prevail in the two-year redistricting battle.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court on Tuesday struck down Section Five of the federal Voting Rights Act, the provision that for four decades has required Texas and eight other states - plus regions of seven others - to get federal approval of any new election laws or redistricting plans.

The ruling makes it likely - unless a lower court in San Antonio disagrees - the interim congressional and legislative maps used in the 2012 election, will be adopted for the rest of the decade and next year's elections will be held on time.

Over the weekend, the Legislature approved such maps in the special session that ends at midnight today. Gov. Rick Perry is expected to sign the measure because, at Abbott's request, he asked the lawmakers to adopt such maps to avoid the chaos and confusion that characterized the 2012 election.

Due to the legal fight, the state's Democratic and Republican primaries were twice delayed and finally held on May 29, nearly three months after the initially scheduled date.

Moreover, the runoffs were held on July 31, three months before the general election.

Tuesday's ruling drew emotional responses from minority lawmakers across the nation. Recounting their roles in getting the 1965 law passed, Congressmen John Lewis of Georgia and John Conyers of Michigan said the court's decision ignores history and the continuing efforts to deny voting rights to minorities.

Conyers is the longest-serving black member of Congress.

Lewis was severely beaten in the civil rights marches of the 1960s campaigning for the law. He said: "We don't want to go back."

The high court said Congress must produce new data to justify continuing to make states and local jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination get Justice Department approval before changing election laws.

Chief Justice John Roberts began his majority decision reprising the original rationale for the act: "to address entrenched racial discrimination in voting, 'an insidious and pervasive evil which had been perpetuated in certain parts of our country through unremitting and ingenious defiance of the Constitution.'"

In the intervening years, obstacles to minority voting became less pervasive and less blatant, although nine states, mostly in the South, and parts of six others, still were required to get federal approval in advance before changing their voting laws.

The Voting Rights Act, in sum, worked, greatly increasing minority participation in the political process and the number of minority officeholders.

Indeed, some conservative opponents of the law and virulent critics of Barack Obama said the simple fact of a black president is proof the law no longer is needed.

If the high court is as sensitive to the will of Congress as some advocates have claimed, the court didn't show it in the Voting Rights decision. A Republican-run Congress under a Republican president, George W. Bush, in 2006 overwhelmingly - 98-0 in the Senate and 390-33 in the House - voted to extend the law, including the existing preclearance provisions, for 25 years.

In the 2006 case and another in 2009, the court strongly hinted that Congress should revisit and revise if necessary the standards and formulas, largely unchanged for nearly five decades, by which it determined which states and jurisdictions were subject to preclearance.

Roberts chided Congress for not using that time to "to fashion a coverage formula grounded in current conditions. It instead re-enacted a formula based on 40-year-old facts having no logical relation to the present day."

And so he and four other justices found Section 4 of the act, the pre-clearance formula "unconstitutional in light of current conditions."

Roberts is right that the problems may be decades old, but minority lawmakers said the issues haven't gone away, only changed their shape. Instead of beatings and literacy tests, there are onerous voter ID laws, gerrymandering, inconveniently located polling places and curtailed voting hours.

Rather than a simple appeal to the Justice department's civil-rights division, aggrieved would-be voters must turn to the cumbersome process of litigations; that is, unless Congress updates the preclearance formulas to the five justices' satisfaction.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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